Lossless
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
A long long time ago in a galaxy not far away, I used to own an Apple iPod. Not the fancy coloured touch screen ones those young ‘uns owns these days, but the ye olde black and white fat thick iPod which the iPod classic is modelled after. Back then not every Tom, Dick, Jane Doe and Grandmas know what an iPod is let alone own one. It felt unique and special to have one.
Sadly, it met it’s demise right after the one year warranty ended and I’ve never touched one since. Fast forward to today, I’ve started working and have the ability to purchase reasonably quality electronics. I’ve bought a dedicated sound card and 5.1 surround system for my PC and
I must say that quality sound does really brings new life and dimension to the games. I can hear every twig break and rustling leaves and I traverse Middle Earth. I can hear the pipes creak and subtle scurrying of creatures in the distant while exploring the creepy USG Ishimura in Deadspace.
Watching high definition 1080p Bluray movies with DTS 5.1 surround sound is another joy. Recently, my Nokia N95 8GB was dying. I caved in and gave Apple a second chance by replacing it with an iPhone 3GS 32gb. Its great to be rid of the sluggish performance that the N95 has been giving me for the past 2 years and I get and iPod to boot.
I used to use my N95 as a portable music player as well, although the interface wasn’t as good as the iPod. What made me search for an alternative was during an 8 hour flight, I realised I can’t use my N95 to listen to music! Thankfully newer phones have included a “Flight Mode” for us to use our smart-phones various other multimedia capabilities while traveling in the air.
Recently, I’ve ripped by The Fray CD into iTunes and by extension my iPhone, encoded in Apple’s Lossless format. Putting on my new Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5vi noise-isolating earphones with voice capability, I immediately noticed the difference in quality when listening to the lossless and lossy formats when played back to back.
Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. The term lossless is in contrast to lossy data compression, which only allows an approximation of the original data to be reconstructed, in exchange for better compression rates.
Apple Lossless (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple for lossless data compression of digital music. Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 container with the filename extension .m4a. It is not a variant of AAC, but uses linear prediction similar to other lossless codecs such as FLAC and Shorten. The only reason I’m using ALAC is because its the only lossless format that can be played on the iPod/iPhone as far as I know.
The songs that I used to rip are in 128kbps mp3s with some noticeable static/noise and occasionaly ‘poppings’. It annoyed me to no end for some reason. I think I might embark on a big project soon to convert my 6000+ songs library into lossless format. But first I need to track down those damn CDs.
Category : Journal Entries
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